Fire Hawk (31 page)

The aspect of the order that had caused Pushkin to investigate was its extraordinary completeness. It wasn't just spare wings or a replacement nose cone that the 166
^th
Rocket Regiment had ordered, but an
entire
set of parts. Every single item that was needed to assemble a brand-new, fully operational, turbine-powered pilotless plane, complete with launch rails and rocket booster. The only items not included were the drone's photographic equipment.

His first guess was that the 166
^th
were trying it on. That they'd destroyed a drone in a training accident and had their request for a replacement refused by the Odessa Military District on grounds of cost. He'd suspected some opportunist gunner CO was simply trying to sidestep headquarters by obtaining a new drone in kit form.

Pushkin had referred the matter to his own commanding officer, a man he'd known and trusted for many years. But instead of advising him to return the paperwork to the Rocket Regiment for verification – the reaction he'd expected – Colonel Komarov had ordered him to process the spares request without further delay.

It was then that his crisis of conscience had begun. He knew that his suspicions merited further investigation, yet to do anything about it meant disobeying a senior officer, something outlawed by the principles instilled in him by his five formative years at the Kievskoye Military Aviation Engineering school.

His dilemma had been compounded by the fact that
Colonel Komarov was a friend as well as his CO. Eight years earlier they'd served in Germany together. Of equal rank then, and still so four years ago when religion had returned to fashion in Ukraine, Komarov had become Nadya's godfather. With that honour a
kym
had been established between the two men, a personal bond that gave them the closeness of brothers.

In Pushkin's battle with his conscience, loyalty to his commander had won. He'd stifled his concerns about the legitimacy of the spares order and pressed on with preparing the goods for delivery. A telephone call purportedly from the 166
^th
had asked him to provide transport because their own trucks were unserviceable. The drone components had filled a Ural eight-tonner. At an arranged hour an officer and two soldiers from the receiving regiment had arrived in a jeep to escort the load to its destination near the Moldavian border, one hundred kilometres away.

That had been Friday, exactly a week ago. It should have been an end to the matter, but hadn't been. Later that afternoon the empty truck had returned much earlier than Pushkin would have expected after a two-hundred-kilometre round trip. His curiosity aroused, he'd telephoned the quartermaster of the Rocket Regiment to check the delivery had been made correctly.

The brief, uncomfortable conversation which had followed had shaken him to the core. The 166
^th
Rocket Regiment, he was told in no uncertain terms, had not placed any order whatsoever for spare parts for their VR-6 reconnaissance drones.

‘Goodbye papa. I love you.'

Nadya kissed him on the cheek, her coat on and her schoolbag in her hand.

‘Goodbye my darling. Be good to your teachers.'

He always said that. Some subconscious hope that the
child being well-behaved would mean that a box or two of surplus fruit from Lena's parents' dacha would satisfy the teachers at exam time rather than the money he didn't have.

Lena saw her daughter off to the bus which took the officers' children to the village school, then came back into the kitchen and sat down opposite her husband. Pushkin saw from her eyes what she wanted to talk about, but he couldn't. Not this morning. Not when he was secretly on his way to see the General and his insides were burning up with fear of what the outcome might be.

Last night, after Nadya had gone to sleep, Lena had talked to him at length. Starting with her familiar moan about how hard it was to survive on his army pay, she'd insisted that he let her get a job. She had one already, part-time at the nursery school – a highly suitable role for the wife of an officer who still nurtured hopes of making the rank of colonel – but the wages were pitiful. The job she'd talked about was in an office in Odessa.

She'd told him of her visit to Odessa earlier that same day. She'd taken the twenty-minute ride south on the electric train in order to shop in the huge farmers' food market where competition made the prices keen. But before plunging into the maze of stalls she'd been unable to resist a stroll through Odessa's tree-lined streets to peer into the handful of glittery boutiques where
biznismen
bought their women skimpy dresses for more money than an army major earned in a year.

‘You want
that,
woman?' Pushkin had asked her angrily. ‘You want to throw money away like those criminals and their whores?'

‘No. Not like them. We'd think of better things to spend it on. But Misha, is this
it
?' There'd been a crack in her voice. Her small hand had swept round the room and
its meagre contents. ‘Are you saying
this
is all there is for us?'

Two single beds used as sofas during the day. An old rug from her mother's house spread on the wall to cover the cracks in the plaster. The twenty-year-old sewing machine with which she stitched her daughter's clothes. A cassette player and a small TV on a shiny veneered wall unit. A few books.

‘Is this the best we can
ever
have, Misha?' There'd been tears in her eyes. ‘Tell me!'

He hadn't replied. Hadn't dared to, because the answer was ‘yes'. He saw no hope of being able to provide them with more.

Seizing on his silence, she'd pressed home her bid to make their lives better, telling him of the small word-processed note she'd spotted in Odessa, stuck to the door of a fine nineteenth-century mansion now used as offices.

‘Good wages for a woman ready for any sort of work, it said.'

He knew what that meant.
Bez Kompleksov
was what they wrote in the ads. Women sought ‘without complexes'.

‘I went inside.'

He'd felt shocked that she should even have considered it, and afraid.

‘It was import-export. Beautiful office. Computers. Italian chairs.'

‘New Russians,' he'd retorted disparagingly.

‘So what? They pay good money. We'd eat
meat
more often, Misha. And Nadya could have clothes which hadn't been made by the clumsy fingers of her mother.'

Pushkin, however, was a man stiffened by the codes of honour and loyalty that Russian officers had held dear since the tsars. To him, the new businessmen with their Mercedes and BMW cars, their Ralph Lauren shirts and their mobile phones were thieves and traitors, creatures
who smuggled their ill-gotten profits abroad and betrayed the needs of their countrymen. Parasites, as responsible for the decline of his newly independent nation as the corrupt and incompetent politicians who filled the parliament in Kiev.

‘They offered me the job,' Lena had whispered, cutting through his thoughts, her pretty eyes sparkling at the thought of connecting with a life she'd glimpsed so tantalisingly on satellite TV. ‘They said they'd teach me computer with Windows 95 and Microsoft Office.'

‘Impossible, Lena. Such places are not for the wife of an officer.'

Lena had turned away from him to hide her anger.

‘You're a dinosaur, Misha. You live in the past. Think of
us,
' she'd pleaded. ‘Think of Nadya and me – not just of your own precious position in society.'

The last word had cut deep. Society was upside down now. People like him, people who used to be revered – the military, the intellectuals, the artists – all now at the bottom of the heap. Below the poverty line. Society's new leaders were the nouveaux riches, the get-rich-quick criminals who'd sold their country's assets to line their pockets. The thieves had taken over the prison.

‘This
biznisman,
' he'd snarled, ‘he would insist you sleep with him?'

Both knew it would be expected of her. There were thousands of women in Odessa wanting a job like this. Plenty who'd go the extra distance to get it.

‘But anyway, it wouldn't be such a big thing,' she'd whispered. ‘You just shut your mind. It's a small price to pay for a better life.'

‘I accepted.'

At the breakfast table now, her words cut into his thoughts as if reading them.

‘Accepted the job,' she repeated. ‘I start on Monday.'

Suddenly he noticed her hair was different. Shorter, with a wave in it that hadn't been there before. When had it changed? Yesterday? A week ago? How would he know when he paid her so little attention?

He stared at her. Never would he have believed that his wife would defy him. Particularly that she should tell him so this very morning of all mornings.

‘We'll see about that, Lena. We'll see about it . . .'

He couldn't spend time arguing with her now. Couldn't get involved in family issues when he faced the greatest crisis of principle that an officer could ever face. A crisis which he'd told her nothing about.

He pushed back the chair. He hadn't touched the
syrniki.
Without another word he stood up and put on the uniform jacket hanging in the hall. Lena stood by the front door as she always did to check over his appearance. She brushed an imaginary hair from his lapel, then leaned forward to be kissed. He pecked her cheek and walked out onto the landing to wait for the lift.

Once on the ground and outside, he strode across the grass to where their faded, rusting car was parked. If Lena was watching from the window above, she would be puzzled, maybe even alarmed, to see him get into the car instead of walking down the road to the administration building as he always did. She would know something unusual was happening and be wondering why he hadn't confided in her. But he hadn't been able to for one simple reason. If he'd told her what he was about to do she would have moved hell and high water to stop him.

The discovery a week ago that the drone spares request had been a forgery had thrown him into a deep quandary. An attempt to raise the matter again with Colonel Komarov had produced an uncharacteristic rebuff and an order, an
order,
to forget the whole matter. Yet his conscience wouldn't let him. Military equipment
had been siphoned out of the system, its destination unknown. And worst of all his CO and long-time friend was clearly aware of the crime.

Such activities weren't new to the military of course. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent in 1991 vast quantities of weaponry belonging to the new nation's armed forces had been sold off, both by the government and by individual officers. Huge personal fortunes had been made selling guns to foreign governments, terrorist organisations and criminal gangs. Now, however, it was his
own
unit and a personal friend of his that had become involved in such criminality. To him it was both shocking and unacceptable.

He'd brooded on the matter for days before deciding what to do. Then, on Tuesday of this week, he'd made an excuse to spend time alone with the driver who'd been assigned to the Ural truck that had driven the drone parts from the base. The lad would surely tell him where he'd taken them. To get the driver to himself, away from prying eyes, he'd decided to make a personal inspection by jeep of the Magerov runway, which was still supposed to be maintained in a usable condition, despite no aircraft having landed there for at least two years.

Private Reznik, a nineteen-year-old conscript, had steered the UAZ jeep slowly down the faded, rubber-scarred runway centreline while Pushkin scanned its surface for damage and for foreign objects that could be sucked into the engines of a jet. The youth had been stiff-backed with fear, knowing something was up. He was too junior to be assigned to driving senior officers around.

Thin-faced and shaven-headed, Reznik was grey from the malnutrition that was a conscript's lot. There would be bruises on his body, Pushkin knew, injuries from the bullying that was endemic in the armies of the former Soviet Union.

‘You miss your home?' Pushkin had asked, knowing he must first break the ice.

‘Of course, comrade Major.' The boy's tone had become almost dismissive. The question was absurd.

‘You write to your mother often?'

‘No, because my letters make her cry.'

Pushkin had looked away. If Lena had given him a son he would go to any lengths to pay the bribes that would secure a bogus medical certificate to spare the boy from military service.

‘Where's home?'

‘A small village. One hour west of Kiev.'

A peasant family, no doubt. No way for such sons of the soil to escape conscription.

‘Any friends from home here with you?'

‘No, comrade Major.'

Lonely then. Lonely and scared as they always were.

‘Stop here a minute.' They'd reached the far end of the runway, the point furthest away from anyone who might see them. ‘There's something I want to talk to you about.'

Reznik had blanched. He'd known what was coming.

‘Last Friday you delivered a load in an eight-tonner.'

The boy had frowned as if trying to remember.

‘Where did you go?'

‘Where I was told to go, comrade Major.'

‘But where was that?'

‘Don't know, comrade Major. The officer said to follow their four-six-nine jeep, and I did.'

‘But where to?'

‘I wasn't looking, comrade Major,' he'd mumbled.

‘Don't be ridiculous! Did they tell you not to say anything? Tell you not to say where you'd been?'

‘Just said to follow the four-six-nine.'

‘To a military base?'

‘Don't kn—'

‘Reznik!'

‘There were gates, comrade Major. Then a yard. I wasn't concentrating.'